


break to new mutiny

by ilgaksu



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: 1500s Venice, Alternate Universe - 16th Century, Alternate Universe - Courtesans, Alternate Universe - Historical, Inspired by Dangerous Beauty, M/M, inspired by Shakespeare
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-11
Updated: 2018-01-11
Packaged: 2019-03-03 16:16:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,663
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13344870
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ilgaksu/pseuds/ilgaksu
Summary: “Who are you?” Keith had asked.“No one,” the boy had said, his eyes bright and strange, pale in his face, - and you know what they say about history, how it repeats itself  - and then he’d smiled, the sharp hook of it impaling Keith right through his chest. “A poor unfortunate soul. If you believe what people say.”In which Lance is the son of a courtesan, Keith is born starving, and they’re both just trying to tread water.





	break to new mutiny

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was originally published in Aphelion, a zine focused on showcasing writers within the Voltron fandom. Title is from the Prologue of Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare.

They’re walking through the piazza, and it feels brazen. They’re not touching, but it feels to Keith as though every statue’s blank yet lovely eyes slide to follow them. He’s seen how they look together, in the reflection of the canals, in his own dreams. Keith, neat and careful with his black coat, the white lace at his throat, all-dark eyed to the glitter of Lance in pewter embroidery and scarlet, all his mother’s son. Keith can’t help but feel wary. Like the Sisters on their way to sing at the Basilica can see the sting Lance’s mouth has left on his skin, disrupting everything underneath the surface. He thinks the statues might understand more than their makers. Like him - like them all - they were floating. One day, long after everyone else was gone, they would be submerged. A silent underwater cemetery. 

Lance catches his eye and smiles. It’s a scanty thing, the sort of thing where you reach out and you’re caught on the undertow of it.

When Keith was thirteen, he saw them pull a courtesan from the canal by his house. The ream of her hair, the pallor of a mermaid, how the weight of her own dress and the hidden tides had combined to drag her down: the image of her had stayed with Keith long after his mother had pulled him away alongside her, her mouth a frown. 

“Who was she?” he’d asked. 

“No one,” his mother had said at first. Then she had looked behind her, at the woman all laid out, and something had shifted in her face. “A poor unfortunate soul. This is why I don’t like you playing near the water. It’s more dangerous than it looks. It always is.” 

“How am I not to play near the water?” Keith couldn’t help but be confused. “We live on it.” 

She hadn’t ever explained. And then when, years later, a boy had caught him stood on the lip of a bridge, staring down at the way the lights of the carnival lit up the water, as though something beneath was trying to send a warning to the world above - 

 

(“Who are you?” Keith had asked. 

“No one,” the boy had said, his eyes bright and strange, pale in his face, - and you know what they say about history, how it repeats itself  - and then he’d smiled, the sharp hook of it impaling Keith right through his chest. “A poor unfortunate soul. If you believe what people say.”)

 

Here’s where we’ll start: Keith is twenty years old. He is to be married next month. He has met the girl four times. He lives in a city raised above water. Plagued by plagues and wars and ships in the harbour that Keith watches from his bedroom window each morning, in a family who want to raise him above their lives. His wife-to-be is white-skinned. Italian, her first tongue. Venetian in a way strangers claim Keith - son of a sailor who made his money out of Murano - can never be, though they were both born within the same span of five canals. 

Keith doesn’t think he’s ever been left alone with her. He thinks that shouldn’t make him so relieved.   
  


He is drowning. 

  
  


*

 

Lance throws himself down next to him on the step. In this quarter of the city, all of the balcony doors are flung wide open in advertisement. Guests are welcome. When Keith passes by on foot, he can hear laughter falling from some of the windows, no matter what time of day. He never hears crying.  _ Courtesans don’t cry,  _ Lance had said. It’s been five days since they met, and already the smell of him is familiar.  

“Do you have a different jacket for every hour?” Keith says. Lance throws his head back and laughs. The gold-limned flowers on his collar shift in the dusk-light, like something seething and alive. 

“Only every other hour,” Lance replies, then elbows him and stands up, so fast it disorientates Keith without having moved himself. “Come on. You can hang me for vanity later. Half the city will turn up to watch.”

“What about the other half?”

“Oh,” Lance says, “They’ll be busy rushing to console my mother. They’ll try and walk on water to get there first.” He laughs again.  

Keith has seen Lance’s mother, though she hasn’t seen him. Her gaze passed over him, glazed with polite disinterest. She knows how to read men for coin, for inclination. Keith has the first, but on the second she’ll have come up empty. If she’s anything like her son, he hopes he can pass by her unseen forever. When Lance looks at Keith, it’s like he’s reached right inside his chest, undoing all of the moorings that keep the tides at bay, unstitching him down to a very small and sparse something. And Lance, Keith knows, has his mother’s eyes. 

Lance leans over and puts his fingertips to Keith’s chest, on the button closest to his heart, pressing down hard enough for Keith to feel it. He tilts his head, birdlike, blinking at Keith. Keith’s caught. 

“When do you have to go?” Lance asks. In another voice, it might be a complaint. In Lance’s, it’s entirely dispassionate. In the world Lance lives in, Keith thinks, people are always leaving, always moving, always on their way to or from. Keith’ world, by comparison, is walking down a very long corridor, one that’s been narrowing so slowly he’s never noticed, until now: until he’s faced with a dead end and no room to turn back to the beginning. 

_ We make do with what we know, _ Keith thinks helplessly. 

“Three hours,” he admits. Shiro thinks he’s gone to the library for the morning. He can lie and say he got waylaid in the marketplace. Lance smiles at him, leans forward and tucks Keith’s hair behind his ear. He’s a walking flood warning, and Keith is still staring out on the harbour after everyone else has locked themselves away with their children and favourite china, entranced by the way his nerves sing at him to retreat. He holds fast instead. Lance smiles at him. His thigh, pressed against Keith’s where he sits on the step, is warm.  

“We’ll work with it,” he says, almost wistful, and then: “I have some more pamphlets I think you’d like.”

Lance - ever since he learnt about Keith, voracious, tearing through the library like a wildfire - has been slipping him some of the latest pamphlets, leaking through the city’s underbelly like tar. They mock the rich, undercut the Church, they’re a sinner’s creed and Keith reads them all. One, which Lance had snatched back, suddenly embarrassed, was a tirade on the history of sodomy. It said Nero had married two men once. It said the emperor after him was so fond of boys a beautiful young man secured his father’s pardon by it. It’s a history that writes them into history - what they do as part of what they are - and even with everything’s that passed between them, Lance watched him with eyes doe-wary. Lance never says how they come to be in his mother’s house, where they hide them away - a repository of secrets, clam-lipped. But he can’t stop handing them over to Keith, Keith and his hungry eyes and his hungry mouth. 

He can’t stop giving to Keith. Aren’t all the worst sins where someone just takes? 

“Are you trying to get me into trouble?” Keith deadpans. Lance throws his head back and laughs. 

“I’m not going anywhere you aren’t following.” 

 

*

 

They meet like this: carnival comes from the words  _ carne vale.  _ It makes sense then, that people are out searching for meat. The city is hungry. Keith has never seen so many of Venice’s courtesans, up close and in one place, ablaze with gems and powdered skin and silk that ripples like the sea that all their lives float upon. 

“Put your eyes back in your head,” Shiro says, but he’s laughing. His step looser than barely an hour ago, though he’s not had a sip of wine. At carnival, he’s more than a veteran wounded out of the wars, more than Keith’s friend. At carnival, he could be anyone. And though he doesn’t say anything, Keith can tell from how his eyes light on the crowds that he’s looking for someone. 

“Go find her,” Keith tells him, and smirks at the startled look Shiro gives him in turn. “I’ll be fine.” 

“I promised -” Shiro had told Keith’s mother he’d keep an eye on him. 

“So go find her _ quickly. _ I’ll be fine until midnight. You can meet me then.” That buys them both a sole, whole hour. “What could I have done in that time?” He looks at Shiro’s expression. “No, don’t answer that.”

In the end, Shiro only needs another quarter hour of constant persuasion. That fact alone confirms Keith’s suspicions. The second Shiro rounds the corner, melding into the crowd like water closing over his head, Keith takes a huge breath, and plows through himself. He sticks to an opposite trajectory to Shiro. There’s no fun in running back into his keeper, not when Shiro might assume it means Keith’s had enough. 

Keith hasn’t had enough. It’s carnival. He’s starving. 

 

*

 

The canal winks up at him. Keith, half a flagon of wine in, walks along the bridge, feet on the lip of the railing. A single misstep, and he’ll be under the water he was born on, all before he has time to take a breath. Over to the right, the party still rages. Keith had snuck away down a sidestreet when the noise got too loud, too garish, echoing against the noise in his head too well. He keeps looking at things he can’t have in the crowd, and the danger of carnival is that he’s telling himself he can have them. Like he’d know how to stop. Like he’d know where to  _ start.  _

The water below him glistens, reflecting the braziers lit along the bank further up. It makes the world look on fire.

He’s not sure what he’s doing. He’s not sure he ever has been. If wine makes you honest, it’s stripped back Keith’s tongue, filled up a hole in his chest somewhere, one he’s been telling himself he hadn’t even noticed.

“Don’t throw yourself in,” he hears someone say, “I mean, it’s dark, but I’m almost certain it’d be a waste.” 

He jolts so badly he nearly topples over - hears a gasp - regains his balance, and turns to look over his shoulder. There’s a boy there, about his age, looking stricken and stammering, saying, “No, don’t - I didn’t - I was only -” 

The boy is all dressed in white, the drapery of it pulled taut against his shoulders, semi-translucent. When he steps towards Keith, all caution, he moves silently - or maybe it’s that Keith can’t hear, over the blood beating in his ears, over his own breathing. Strange and beautiful, ghostlike, but for the high colour of his wine-flushed face, his skin stark in contrast, the crown of leaves and flowers - made of bright, artificial silk - in his hair. 

“You don’t look real,” Keith tells him. It’s half a confession, a way for him to say what he truly is thinking:  _ I can’t believe that you’re real.  _

“Are you mad?” the boy tells him, then, “Get down from there. You’ll only hurt yourself. Whatever you’ve had, it’s all gone to your head.” 

And then, he holds out his hand. 

 

*

 

“I have to go,” Keith murmurs, pressing the boy back into the wall. The sounds of the carnival, raging ever onwards towards dawn, are faint over the shallow of their breathing. Shallow, shallows: the reflection of the water, silvery in the night, shivers ribbons of light across the high bones of the boy’s face, the harsh bruise of his mouth. Someone laughs, or screams, in the distance - Keith isn’t sure. 

“So go,” the boy whispers back, trapping Keith against him with hands twisting and insistent at the bow of his spine. “Nobody’s stopping you.” 

“I don’t even know your name,” Keith admits, half-delirious, his attention narrowing to the set of teeth at his collarbone. “I don’t know who you are.” 

“You’re one of the merchant’s sons,” the boy tells him, leans back, all satisfied, to look at the surprise on Keith’s face. “I’m right, aren’t I? You don’t have to say. I can always tell. You can never hold your drink. You don’t know how to dress outside of funerals. And then you come over here with eyes asking for -”

He doesn’t say _ the world,  _ but that’s because Keith interrupts, saying, “I wasn’t asking for anything,” before he lets the boy finish. “I kissed you first.”

“And I kissed you second. Are we keeping count? Is there a winner?” 

“We can’t all be from your Venice,” Keith snaps, and feels the boy still against him, then snicker softly. When Keith meets his eyes, they’re steady. The boy pitches forward, dropping his head to Keith’s shoulder. 

“You’re quicker than I thought,” he says into the fabric. “Do you know my mother, then?” 

“I’ve heard of her.” Keith had noticed the pale blue cuffs - the petals embroidered into the fabric, the coat of arms half-hidden and stitched to fit against the boy’s inner wrist. And, despite his best efforts to bury himself away, Keith did listen to the city talk. Courtesans, especially ones as famous as her, were the best form of currency when it came to gossip. “But I didn’t know she had a son.” 

And Keith isn’t lying. He hadn’t expected that part. He’d just assumed the boy was part of the household, running errands, keeping the books. 

“You don’t listen enough then,” the boy says, and leans back. He runs his thumb over the seam of Keith’s lips, careful. “Do you have to run home?”

It’s an out, if Keith wants it. It shouldn’t feel like being offered an exit wound. Keith tightens his hold on the boy’s hips, chasing warmth. 

“Not until midnight,” Keith says, insistent. “I still don’t know your name.” The boy smiles again, unsteady, and rests his forehead against Keith’s. Keith can smell smoke, drifting over to them. Something is burning. Probably a bonfire. Keith couldn’t care less. “Can I have your name?” 

“I’ll see.”

“You’ll see what?”

“If you earn it,” the boy replies. 

 

*

 

Keith runs headlong into Shiro. It’s five minutes past midnight. Keith’s heart is a wild, monstrous thing, singing and alive in his chest. 

“I nearly went looking for you,” Shiro says, voice laced with worry, clothes neat. “I thought you’d fallen into the canal.” He looks askance at Keith when Keith lets loose, the hysteria and the thrill and all of the heat banked under his skin rising up to boiling point. “Why are you laughing? What did I say?” 

“Nothing,” Keith gasps. Shiro looks him over, trying not to smile. He’s failing. Keith wonders where he’s been, to have been left so clearly, equally happy. 

He doesn’t ask. It might require an exchange of secrets. Keith doesn’t want to share. 

“Fix your collar,” is all Shiro says, before turning around and marching off, leaving Keith to fall back into step. 

 

*

 

It takes him all morning to get away. Finally, he slips out of a backdoor and races down past the waterways, slowing when anyone passes. It takes him half an hour to find the right building, and he goes around to the side door, like he’d been told to. Knocks four times, like he’d been told to. Waits, swallowing down his own heart, over and over, feeling the ricochet of his pulse rise ever higher to the sound of approaching footsteps.  

“You’re here,” Lance says, surprised. Pleased. Stood in the doorway, realer in the daylight, more tired. His hair is a mess. Keith wants to say his name and is also afraid to say his name. It’s been sat, ripening, in his mouth all the night since they parted. 

“Lance,” he says, finally, breathlessly, and then loses all his words at once. It doesn’t matter. Lance lets him in anyway. 

 

*

 

“You seem,” Keith’s mother says at dinner, a few days later, “To be very - very about in the world these days. It’s good to see you taking an interest in the city.”

Keith nods and takes another bite of food. Washes it down. 

“Thank you,” he manages in reply. 

His mother hums under her breath, scrutinising him with his own dark eyes in her face. The look lasts for a slow and deadly moment, before she returns to her plate. Keith takes one breath, then another, and then starts again at his own meal. 

 

*

 

They’re on the very boundary of San Marco when it happens. Lance is pressed close to Keith’s side, blaming his closeness on the crowds, gesticulating wildly - until something ahead of them catches his eye. Keith sees the moment he shutters, closed down like a plague house, all the inhabitants left to God’s mercy: it’s in his eyes, first, but it moves down his hands like bloodstream. 

“What’s wrong?” Keith asks. Lance bites his lip and shakes his head, his gaze an unwavering, unbroken line between him and - 

The stranger takes another few steps in their direction. The coat of arms at his collar, nestled in black fur, hits the light. All that glisters is not gold, but Keith’s sure if he bit down on the crest he’d come away the worse for it, loose tooth and all. 

“He’s a Medici,” Keith realises. 

“Yes,” Lance replies, staccato. He spits it out, the word  _ yes _ like another man might say _ poison.  _ It’s anything but ceding to something. 

As the man passes, Keith nods in greeting. He’s a Medici, after all. You can’t get on the bad side of a Medici. They own the banks, and through it, have their hands on the whole city, each man’s nearest and dearest. Even so, Lance keeps his head up and his eyes cold, boring into the man’s skull until he’s gone. Though he’s barely acknowledged, Keith can see how the tense bowstring of Lance’s shoulders duplicates itself; how it passes to the Medici like infection. A plague upon his house.  

“What’s gotten into you?” Keith asks, tugging at Lance’s arm. It doesn’t break his attention, so Keith settles for dragging him through the slipstream of San Marco’s traffic, until the man is out of sight. He sees Lance rousing out of the anger - which had been old and bloody, the rage of it in his eyes unsettling Keith down in his own bones - and blinking at Keith, remembering himself, all first breath and reaching the surface. “That’s a Medici. You can’t just -” 

“I know who he is,” Lance says, slowly, his jaw sharp. 

“Well, he has no idea who you are,” Keith can’t help but point out. He’s sounding so sensible he’s practically half out of his own skin with it. It’s mostly - the thought of Lance taken away from him, thrown in a cell or torn up as punishment, until his eyes dulled and he learnt to hold his tongue - 

The absence would grow on Keith like an abscess, something somehow hollow. It would be unbearable. 

“He knows of me,” Lance says, then sighs, glancing away at Keith’s face and up at the sky, visible in a bright pocket above the alleyway. He frowns. 

“Because of your mother,” Keith guesses. Lance’s eyes slide to him. Keith, feeling peeled open by the look in Lance’s eyes but unwilling to give ground, stares back. After a moment Lance sighs again, deflating. He shrugs. 

“Something like that,” he says. He leans forward, one hand against old stone, and kisses the spot just below Keith’s ear. It’s fast, like a puncture wound, reeling through Keith even after Lance swiftly pulls back again.

The alleyway is still empty. No one’s seen. Keith knows Lance is trying for a distraction, tugging Keith back from the topic, from treading on some kind of secret ground. Keith isn’t stupid. That it works so thoroughly - 

“You always look so surprised,” Lance says, grinning, mercury-eyed and mercurial. He lets Keith pull them along, out of the dark of the alley, back amongst living things.

 

*

 

“My father was one of them,” Lance tells Keith, late in the afternoon. His mouth is soft where it’s pressed against Keith’s shoulder, hot through the cloth. Dusk is falling, calling Keith home again, to dinner and prayers and all kind of wholesome routine. He turns away from the window and pretends he hasn’t noticed yet. 

“One of what? A man?” Keith says, because he’s not sure what to say. He knows what Lance is trying to tell him. He’s just not sure he wants to be told. Lance gives him a long look, the corners of his mouth curling upwards despite himself. 

“A Medici,” Lance confirms. “They paid my mother a lot of money to stay far away after the funeral. Before the funeral. Who knows. I was already born, so they were frightened.” Keith can’t see his face properly with Lance hiding it, but he can hear how Lance rolls his eyes, voice crisp with sarcasm when he says, “Bastards are a bleed on the accounts.” 

Keith leans back and traces Lance’s hairline, skimming the skin with his fingertips. Lance watches him. 

“I’m going to be married next month,” he confesses. Lance takes his hand in his, kisses it, and says, “I already know.”

“Oh,” Keith says. It’s more breath than word. 

“Keith,” Lance leans over him, blocking out half the waning light, shrouding them both. “You aren’t - you’re not subtle.” Keith reaches up to steady him, hand on Lance’s waist. “Every time we pass a couple halfway to chapel in the street, you look ready to faint. Or throw yourself in the canal. Like you mean it, this time. And -” 

Lance stops himself. 

“Say it.”

“You - do you remember what I said? About boys like you? Coming over to this part of the city, eyes asking?” Keith nods. He remembers. Lance says, “It’s like that, only not, with you. You always look - like you’re waiting for it to stop. Like all the sand is about to run out.”

Lance lies down next to him again, quiet in the wake of it, and tangles their legs together. 

“I think it’s always been like that.” Keith thinks it’s the first time he’s said that part out loud. Lance raises himself back up on his elbow and kisses Keith on the cheek, a glancing kind of kiss, brushing along the bone like a softer kind of hurt. 

“The light’s nearly gone,” Lance tells him. “You should head back.” 

“No, it hasn’t,” Keith argues, stubborn, and closes his eyes. He hears rather than sees Lance’s smile. 

“Yes, it has.” 

In the end, Keith goes. 

 

*

 

If this was a braver kind of story, a cleaner kind of story, it would go like this: Keith would storm into his father’s house and tell them he was leaving. He’d tell them he wasn’t going to chapel. He’d tell them  _ no.  _

As it is, when he arrives home, dishevelled and chest aching, his mother descends on him barely before he’s cleared the doorstep. She throws a book into his arms, clumsily. Keith catches it, not making the connection until the pages shiver open and he sees it - the corner of the page, where he’d tried to draw Lance’s coat of arms. No. Not Lance’s. His mother’s, hidden at the back, in the binding pages. It felt less dangerous than writing words out loud. 

“If you’re keeping a mistress -” she begins. Keith realises what she thinks - Lance’s mother, one of the most celebrated courtesans in all of the city - and tries not to laugh.  

“I’m not.” 

“Undo it.” It’s an order, but Keith isn’t lying. Keith _ isn’t lying.  _

“I don’t have a mistress.” 

As it is, she locks him in his room. Keith sits and looks out at the harbour. The irony of it is this: all his life, he’s daydreamed of the horizon. Right now, he’s moored too tightly to the land to even try.  

 

*

 

“Your mother is furious,” Shiro tells Keith. 

“I can tell,” Keith retorts. He doesn’t look at Shiro. He keeps staring at the ceiling, at the warps in it from old age. “It’s been four days.” 

Keith has spent his nights watching the harbour dip under the moonlight, unable to sleep, watching the night boats steal out away from the island. His days follow with him sat at his books, listless, plotting, except for meals, which are brought silently by his mother herself. He returns the plate once he’s finished, and then she leaves. 

“I’m surprised she let you in to see me at all,” Keith adds, and feels Shiro sit on the bed by the give of it.

“I told her I would try and have you see sense.” Keith turns, finally looking away from the ceiling. He gives Shiro a blazing look. Shiro puts his hands up in surrender. “Did you want her to let me past the door or not?” 

“I don’t know,” Keith mutters. “Are you going to help, or is this you trying to help?” 

Shiro looks annoyed for a good few moments before his face smooths back out, calm in the way the tide seems calm on the surface. It’s a small, petty, satisfying victory for Keith. It’s been a long four days. 

“I don’t have a mistress,” Keith spits, for the hundredth time. 

Shiro - steady, implacable, all the current sequestered underneath - looks at him. He’s known Keith for years, Keith can’t help but remember. 

Shiro says, “I know.” 

 

*

 

An hour later, Keith watches Shiro through the window. Shiro bows his head to Keith’s mother. Keith can’t hear what they’re saying, voices blurred by the distance and the noise of the harbour, but when Shiro walks away, Keith watches his retreating back for a long time. 

There’s a key left on the table. Keith loops the leather cord wrapped around it twice. Slides it over his neck and covers it with his shirt. 

It beats against his heart, given its own kind of life, and it  _ burns.  _

 

*

 

The ship is named for someone. Some kind of myth. Keith can’t remember, his memory rendered thin by anxiety. He stands at the prow, watching the city disappear into mist. For a long time, it’s a slow, wavering fade, an unravelling, until they pull out of the mist. It seems to snap closed again, like a gate, and Venice is gone. 

“Don’t throw yourself in,” Lance says, low and into his ear. He’s swaddled up in a travelling cloak, all expensive blue dye, flashy and useless. He leans into Keith’s side, blaming it on finding his balance onboard ship. If he hadn’t lived his whole life in a city on water, it’d be a good excuse. 

“You wouldn’t try and get me back?” 

“Not a chance,” Lance replies, shrugging. “I don’t know how to swim.” 

Keith snorts, and then they lapse back into silence. It stretches out too long, Keith watching Lance’s profile as Lance watches where Venice was, and now isn’t. 

“Does your mother know?” Keith asks, quiet. Lance nods, not looking at him. 

“I’ll write,” he explains, as though that’s it. And maybe it is. Keith isn’t sure how Lance found him, found the money - when he’d asked, Lance had said  _ my mother is a courtesan and my father was a Medici,  _ as though that was it, too. 

Keith’s pulse is ticking, but it’s less of a clock now. There’s nothing to count down to. 

“Not that we’re keeping count,” Keith mutters, “But I don’t know how to pay you back.” 

“You can’t,” Lance says, easily. It almost stings, until he adds, “I suppose you can try, though.” He nudges Keith, shoulder brushing shoulder. “I’ll tell you when you can stop.” 

“No, you won’t.” 

“No, I won’t.” 

 

Keith turns his back on the mist, and waits for the new sky. 

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Whilst this is the least historically researched fic I've written in some time, here are some historical notes, as usual:
> 
>  
> 
>   
> \- The [Medici family](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Medici) were a hugely powerful and influential banking family from Florence.
> 
>  
> 
> \- The pamphlets are intended as a reference to the [Inquisition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inquisition). 
> 
>  
> 
> \- Lance's reference to walking on water is a religious metaphor. At the time, Venice - and Italy by extension - was deeply Catholic. I wouldn't like to make comment on the impact of religion on social life in Italy nowadays, as I've never visited. 
> 
>  
> 
> \- The colour blue was very expensive at the time, due to the cost of the dye, and so blue clothing was a status symbol - to such a degree that the Virgin Mary was depicted in it, due the cost of both the dye and the blue paint used to create the image.
> 
>  
> 
> \- Courtesans were granted a strange liminal status in society. Whilst they were treated as pariahs by other women, for the most part, courtesans were often highly educated political opponents. For more information about the tradition of Venetian courtesans, I'd recommend [Dangerous Beauty](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dangerous_Beauty) for the glitzy Hollywood treatment, and reading about [Veronica Franco](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veronica_Franco), the woman the film is based on, for more accurate history. 
> 
>  
> 
>  


End file.
